Coursera has introduced a new tool that helps universities identify courses on the company's online learning platform that most closely match their on-campus offerings. The CourseMatch solution uses machine learning and natural language processing to "automate the matching and minimize the need for human curation," according to a company blog post.

CourseMatch can "ingest" on-campus course catalogs in more than 100 languages and map them to the most relevant Coursera courses in any of the languages available on the platform. It then returns up to five "matches" along with a relevance score, with higher scores given for stronger matches.

Some 1,800 schools globally have already used the tool to match more than 2.6 million on-campus courses with Coursera equivalents, according to the blog post. "Coursera is helping us to quickly take our programs virtual while maintaining program integrity and quality," commented Terik Tidwell, managing director of the Smith Tech Innovation Center at Johnson C. Smith University.

Institutions whose course catalog is not yet listed on CourseMatch can e-mail a CSV file of their catalog to [email protected] to have it mapped within two business days.

About the Author

About the author: Rhea Kelly is executive editor for Campus Technology. She can be reached at [email protected].